


The Fifth of First Seed

by muldezgron



Category: Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind
Genre: Additional Warnings Apply, Apocalypse, Elder Scrolls Lore, Elder Scrolls Online Revised Lore, Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim References, Future Fic, M/M, Mental Institutions, Yes again, e.g. 2E rather than 3E Morian Zenas, explicit rating is for the final chapter, not an au, the permanent struggle between marketing and spoilers is real
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-30
Updated: 2020-12-31
Packaged: 2021-03-11 01:56:10
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 14,913
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28417233
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/muldezgron/pseuds/muldezgron
Summary: At the end of the Fifth Era, Divayth Fyr has self-admitted to Nightgate in the Pale. He knows what's coming. He's known for a while.The time for miracles has long past. The only thing he can do now is wait.
Relationships: Divayth Fyr/Other(s)
Comments: 3
Kudos: 10





	1. The Hermit

**Author's Note:**

> When I was writing Three Times That Miraak Saw Azura, I thought to myself, "God, I'd love to read Divayth Fyr's side of everything. That has to be fascinating. I guess I'll have to write it myself."
> 
> This is not, in fact, the Divayth Fyr's Side of Everything that I had in mind. But it is the story that 2020 wrote, for better or worse.

The ice fishermen were out in full force on the frozen surface of Lake Yorgrim that morning. The entire surface seemed like it was littered with brightly colored shelters, folding chairs, beer coolers and ATVs—far enough away that the fishermen looked like ants on the ice, but close enough to still see the bright orange flags on the exposed tip-ups.

“Look at those troopers go,” said Bjorn, leaning against the window and staring out at the lake in wonder. “They’ve been out there every day for how long now?”

“Too long,” said Sothgra, picking at their porridge. “Nords love freezing their asses off.”

Bjorn chuckled, steaming up the glass in front of his face. “Nah, the ones in the shelters aren’t freezing at all. Trust me, those things are toasty. You have to get up and leave them time to time just to keep yourself from sweating like a hog in your own skin.”

“I thought that orcs also had a tradition of ice fishing,” said Wulf. He leaned onto the table with one arm, his thin frame almost vanishing into a thick fisherman’s sweater.

“Maybe they do in Wrothgar,” replied Sothgra. “Hell if I’d know, though. Never been there myself.”

Divayth hovered over his coffee, saying nothing. He did not look up from the table and gave no outward sign that he was paying attention. He was paying attention, of course. He almost always was. After all, there was nothing else to do.

Conversation fell silent for a moment as Bjorn fell into enraptured reverie and Sothgra continued to stir their porridge in circles without ever eating it. The silence was broken by Wulf softly clearing his throat.

“Say, Divayth,” he said, and the dark elf looked up and met his gaze. Somehow this gesture was startling—Wulf’s gentle blue eyes flashed wide for the briefest moment, and he immediately glanced away towards the window.

His pupils might have also dilated, but that could have been wishful thinking.

“Yes?” This was all Divayth said before he raised his coffee cup and took a sip. Really, any noise could have served the same purpose: a break in continuity. A change in the pattern.

The soft crinkle returned to Wulf’s eyes, though he continued to stare out the window. “Well, there was something I was curious about, and it seems like it’s the kind of thing you’d know. Since you seem to know a lot of things.”

He found himself nodding in response, though no one was actually looking at him, and immediately feeling foolish for it. “Ask away, then.”

“Why _is_ ice less dense than water?” asked Wulf, bringing his gaze back from the window and folding his hands on the table. “I mean, I understand that it’s less dense. That’s why it freezes from the top down, and that’s why ice fishing is even possible in the first place, because anything else would kill all the fish. But _why?_ Why is water like that, and nothing else is?”

“Malanen bonding,” he replied, without a moment’s hesitation. Wulf’s furrowed brow made it clear this was not a familiar term, and with a brief sigh Divayth added, “Give me a moment, I’ll need to draw a diagram for this.”

With a brief swipe of his hand, a blank sheet of paper began to float over from a nearby windowsill, followed closely by a pen, and both gently settled onto the table before him.

“Now then,” Divayth said, taking up the pen with a flick of a finger. “I’m sure you’re familiar with the alchemical formula for water. Two malanen adabal, one molakynd adabal.” He swiftly set down a drawing of a circle with an oht with two legs sprouting off, each with one circle containing a hekem.

“You’ll notice the shape of the adasel is bent,” he continued, indicating the shape with the pen hovering over the paper. “That’s not an accident. In order for the molakynd adabal to complete its wall, it needs to form sharing bonds to be allowed two lyekynd, and in exchange loan the use of two of its lyekynd in turn. That leaves two lone pairs of lyekynd, and since all the bonds and lone pairs need to be as far apart from each other as possible, that means the adasel’s true structure is that of a three-cornered pyramid.”

With a few short strokes, he had drawn a new three-dimensional diagram of the same adasel, now with a sphere labeled oht at the center of a pyramid where the top point and one corner contained spheres labeled hekem, and two corners contained a pair of dots each.

“As you can see,” he said, pen hovering over this new diagram, “there’s no arrangement that can be made where the two malanen adabal are not at the same angle to each other.”

Wulf nodded, one hand rubbing his beard in thought. “And that angle of the malanen is going to be important.”

“Quite,” said Divayth. “Because this arrangement means that the water adasel is a polar adasel, with different partial charges on the molakynd and malanen.” He drew a few signs near the oht sphere indicating negative charge where the dot corners were, and a few more signs near the hekem spheres to indicate positive charge. “Now, what do you suppose this means when there’s not one water adasel, but thousands?”

The old Nord gave it a few seconds consideration, then tapped his finger on the diagram. “Well, when it comes to poles, like rejects like and opposites attract, so I’d guess the malanen are going to avoid other malanen and be drawn towards molakynd.”

Divayth allowed himself a small beam of pride. “Absolutely correct. And that means—”

He was interrupted by a familiar hand tossing a photocopied sheet over his diagram. A second sheet promptly settled in front of Wulf.

“It’s time for the morning check-in,” said Nilwenya, as she handed out sheets to everyone else. “We’ll give you a minute or two to fill everything out and then we can get started.”

Divayth took a sip of his coffee, if only to hide his sour expression with the cup.

Nilwenya was the sort of Altmer who took the painstaking effort to fill out her full, unabbreviated name on her name tag, even though it required lettering the size of ants and rendered the whole exercise meaningless. She angled her chin as if she needed the bridge of her nose to guide her eyes in the proper direction, lest they get lost somehow. Every personal interaction felt like an overly long opportunity to contract secondhand mortification.

The patients joked that she had to be a Thalmor spy, though what she had been sent to do was the part of the joke that changed with the hour. “She’s here to learn the secrets of Sheogorath from the mad” was a popular variant, but so was “she’s here as part of a secret Thalmor plan to make Nords stop drinking mead”. The joke was obvious enough that they made no effort to hide it from Nilwenya and would often attempt to pull her into it, trying to get her to “confirm” increasingly absurd Thalmor mission plans—“you’re here to unravel the mystery of Eidar cheese, aren’t you”—and she would sigh and shake her head and herd them back in the direction of The Program.

Ironically, she probably _was_ Thalmor. Probably no one of great importance. The line of ants on her name tag was likely to be her real name. Haj-Vastei had recommended Nightgate to Divayth precisely because “they have an entire floor for people like you”. It was only reasonable to plant someone there, just in case a five-thousand-year-old Dunmer sorcerer lets anything interesting slip out between the morning medication queue and his first cup of coffee.

He had to admit he felt sorry for her. If she ever did learn his secrets, she’d hopefully have the sense to abandon her post and rush back to the Isles. Go home, Nilwenya, while there’s still a home to return to.

“You do realize,” said Divayth, “that I am here as a _patient_ , not a professional.”

The Director shuffled through the papers on his desk. “Yes, I realize that. I have the records from Dr. Haj-Vastei here with me. But you must understand, with this change in context…” He trailed off uneasily.

People always tended to forget to look at the camera instead of the farsight panel on their own end, so the lack of eye contact meant nothing. Even so, the way it made it look like the Director was staring at Divayth’s neck instead of his face didn’t help matters any.

He rubbed at his eyes and ran his hand down his cheeks. “Look. If you want my advice—”

The Director practically shot upright in his seat, hands perched on the arms of his chair.

“—in every crisis, there are people who deny it, whose whole identities are built on denial. The names they call themselves change over time, but the idea is always the same. Even the Knahaten Flu was a hoax to someone.” Divayth made a point to look away from the Director’s projected face and focus on the pinprick of light at the top of the panel’s frame. “Find those people in your existing staff. Offer them sufficient bonuses, and they’ll keep working to the end.”

He could tell, even without looking down, that he was being stared at in bewilderment. That was honestly the most normal thing about this interaction.

“Be careful to keep it in the realm of the plausible,” Divayth added. “Something you could actually follow through on if a miracle happens. You don’t want to accidentally convince them with simple economics where scientific consensus always failed.”

The Director’s upright posture began to falter. “Ah.”

He looked down at the panel, his gaze rolling across the renewed hunching of the doctor’s head and shoulders. “You were hoping I had such a miracle, weren’t you?”

“Well,” he said, “you are Divayth Fyr—”

“Yes,” said Divayth, “and as those records detail, I am here to receive treatment for acute suicidal ideation. Does that sound like someone who has a last ditch option available to save the world?”

He tapped at his desk with the rubber end of his pencil. “No. No, it doesn’t.”

“Is there anything related to that treatment that you’ve called me in here to discuss, or was this it?”

“No,” said the Director, with a heavy sigh. “Nothing related to your treatment.”

“Then you will have to excuse me,” said Divayth, rising from his chair. “There’s a distress tolerance group I should try to catch the end of.”

The group had already ended a good quarter of an hour earlier, but it sounded more dignified than “I’m going to grab a cup of coffee and sit next to an old Nord in companionable silence now.”

Wulf was already partway into a game of patience by the time Divayth arrived in the dining hall again. Their only greeting was a brief lifting of his gaze from the cards to the dark elf’s face, followed by a nod of acknowledgement as he settled onto the cushion next to him. They’d both been at Nightgate since the middle of Sun’s Dawn. There wasn’t much point to drawing things out longer than they had to be.

“You didn’t miss much,” said the Nord, as he picked up a red card from a branch and laid it on top of a black card in the roots. “Staff all seem distracted today for some reason. Something must have happened out there, I guess.”

“No doubt,” said Divayth, resting his elbows on the table. It was, in its own way, mildly fascinating how slowly bad news trickled into a place like Nightgate. In the absence of the Connection and live farsight transmissions, news from the outside world had to come from staff or from visitors. It never prevented it completely, but it tended to be late by a day or two. Sometimes it would be delayed as long as a week.

He absentmindedly glanced up to the date on the whiteboard. Morndas, 2nd of First Seed. His eyes flicked over to the clock beside it. Almost noon. 66 hours remained.

Divayth looked back down at the table and took a sip of his coffee.

“I know there’s not much point in worrying about it,” said Wulf, resting his face in one hand as he considered his options. “But it’s hard not to wonder.”

“We’ll find out eventually, I’m sure,” he replied.

The old Nord said nothing, his free hand hovering over the card layout as his brow furrowed in thought. Divayth had never had much fondness for card games, but Nightgate had given him a new appreciation for patience. It was, if nothing else, a completely socially acceptable excuse to watch another man’s hands in action. A card would be drawn and perched between fingers, scarred knuckles tapping on the tabletop in consideration before deftly flicking the card into position. A fingertip would press down firmly, precisely, just hard enough to swipe another card away from the stack beneath it without disturbing the rest.

It was somehow easy to lose track of time just watching Wulf’s hands, without either one of them saying a thing.

It was here that Wulf drew a card from the stock, looked at it, and frowned. He held it without moving for some time, his resting hand changing from an open palm to a loose fist. Divayth leaned closer to his shoulder to get a better look. It was suitless, numbered twelve, and depicted a man tied upside-down to a pole. His ribcage was torn open, empty and bleeding, and his face was turned to the ground in resignation.

“Oh,” said Divayth. “That’s an odd one. I didn’t think they made decks with the trumps in them anymore.”

Wulf turned the card around, verifying the card back was the same as the rest of the cards. “Well, it looks like they still do, after all.”

Divayth slowly reached over and plucked it out of Wulf’s hand. The Nord watched him with half-lidded eyes as he took a closer look at the artwork.

“It’s a very Altmer depiction,” said Divayth. “Hanging upside-down was an old punishment for thieves and traitors. It was a popular way to depict Lorkhan in religious iconography for a few centuries of the First Era.”

The corners of his eyes crinkled with something like amusement. “So you’re saying this is a deck Nilwenya brought in.”

He shrugged. “That’s the most likely explanation. I’ll be deeply surprised if this deck has Talos in it, in any event.” He placed the card face-down on the table between them.

It was, to be frank, something of an unprofessional oversight to bring a deck like that into a Nordic facility. It was also the sort of thing that people became completely adjusted to in childhood, Divayth knew. There were so many things that people took for granted, that they didn’t even consciously see them anymore unless someone else pulled them aside and forced them to look.

Wulf slumped against the padded backrest. “Well, that probably makes this game unbeatable. Didn’t think I’d have to sort through and remove trumps beforehand.”

“Not every game of patience is winnable, anyway,” said Divayth. “Though no one’s ever been able to manage to calculate the odds precisely, it seems like about 1 in 5 games just cannot be won, even with perfect knowledge.”

He chuckled. “Of course you would know that.” He sat upright again, reaching forward to lift the stock and hand it over. “Honestly, I don’t understand why you’re here.”

Divayth took the stock and began fanning through the cards. “What, existentially? Same reason as anyone else, probably.”

An undignified snort escaped Wulf as he scooped the branches, trunk, and roots into a pile and began aligning its edges. “You know that’s not what I mean. You’re clearly an intelligent young man—” (it took everything Divayth had to keep a straight face) “—and yet you’re not off in the heart of Cyrodiil making a name for yourself. You’re here, in the Pale, in a hospital in the middle of nowhere. Why?”

He quickly identified a few more trump cards and sorted them out onto the table—Azura seated on a throne between two pillars, Mephala reflected in a lake with a moon on either side, Boethiah with her hands planted firmly in the jaws of a giant lion. “That doesn’t change the answer, I’m afraid. Same reason as anyone else.”

“I’m not trying to pry into your personal business,” said Wulf, picking up his half of the deck and poking through it. “But you don’t strike me as a dry drunk, Divayth.”

He paused for a moment, considering this. “Fair enough. Same as the other half, then.”

“I’m even less inclined to believe Sheogorath has your number,” Wulf replied, extracting a card and placing it on the table. It was, appropriately enough, the gentleman with a cane about to walk off a cliff. He followed it with Hircine driving forward white and black stags, Sanguine flanked by a pair of lovers, Jyggalag weighed down by three crowns.

“I suppose that’s one way to put it,” said Divayth. “But no, that’s fortunately not a problem I have.”

“Then what is?”

Divayth spread the fanned cards wider, and spied a corner of an illustration that was clearly suitless. He drew it out, though he then had to turn it right-side up to see what it was.

Number nine: a night sky composed of nothing but eyes and tendrils.

He was not entirely sure how much time passed before he realized that Wulf had begun talking to him again.

“Are you all right?” asked Wulf.

“I’m fine,” said Divayth. He threw the card down on top of the others, trying not to look at it. “How much trouble do you think we would get into if we threw these in the bin so we never have to do this again?”

“All of it,” replied the Nord, flashing a grin that doubled as a glowing endorsement of the idea.

There were limits to his patience. Every morning and evening check-in, without fail, Nilwenya would direct everyone in the dining room to “state your name, and pronouns, if you use them.” Divayth would, as always, grit his teeth and say nothing. He’d keep it to a purely internal scream of “we’re speaking Cyrodilic, _pronouns are not optional_ ”.

It was almost astounding how much of the effort that went into proper staff training went completely out the window once they were left to their own devices on the floor.

It was also somewhat unsettling how much it bothered him. He was in the same boat as Bjorn and Wulf. He was at no risk of anyone forgetting his “he/him”, unlike Sothgra having to grit their tusks every five minutes. He should have felt nothing; barring that, he could settle for feeling relieved.

There are only four more of these, he reminded himself, and stated his pronouns.

“Did you make any progress on your treatment goals?” asked Nilwenya. This was always a profoundly awkward question to have to answer in a group setting. It seemed like it was taking the private and making it semi-public, though he was sure the whole point was to enforce a feeling of accountability. Some people would do nothing to improve themselves if it was entirely up to them, but the merest possibility of embarrassment in front of other people was enough to get them to pick up High Hrothgar and haul it clear to Akavir.

Divayth was not one of these people.

“No,” he said. “No progress, unless I’m allowed to move the goalposts.”

She made a neutral hum in response. “Where would you move them, then?”

He glanced at the clock. 59 hours left.

“It might not be very ambitious,” replied Divayth, “but merely staying alive feels like an accomplishment these days.”

“I see.” Another neutral hum as she scratched her pen on her clipboard. “And the things you are grateful for?”

Ah, yes. This part. Three things he was grateful for. Bjorn had the best approach out of all of them. Every morning and evening he named the same three items: coffee, lunch, and the ice fishermen outside on Lake Yorgrim. A short list of simple, concrete objects, sincere and easily explained to the group.

He glanced at Wulf. His eyes were shut and his hands were folded in his lap. He’d already had his turn—his progress report was a smile, a shrug, and the thought that he didn’t spend the day wishing a barrel of mead would materialize out of thin air, so he must be doing something right. The things he was grateful for were always Things He Didn’t Know That He Learned Yesterday/Today. Every last one was something that Divayth had taught him.

The struggle for Divayth wasn’t in finding things to be grateful for. It was in finding things it was _acceptable_ to be grateful for. He usually ended up giving a perfunctory list of basic facts, low effort enough to be obvious guar shit. No one called him on his guar shit, because it was still cooperative by comparison to Sothgra’s vehement refusal to name anything at all.

Divayth had to admire their dedication to no-holds-barred honesty. There was a time, once, when he would have been the same, and somewhere out there, a part of him still was.

That part was with Alfe, of course.

He sighed, and began to list nothing of any importance at all.

It was the middle of the fifth century of the Second Era when a very persistent courier managed to track down Divayth Fyr and deliver a letter from a solicitor in the Imperial City. He had expected it to be a summons, and it was, to some degree, exactly that. The unexpected part was that he was being summoned as a legatee named in the last will and testament of Seif-ij Hidja.

To say this didn’t make sense would have been an understatement. He found himself wondering how likely it was to be a trick, some elaborate posthumous scheme to lure him into a trap.

The solicitor’s credentials checked out. The firm had its offices in the heart of the Market District, so it was unlikely to be anything involving a triggered detonation. Even so, when the solicitor’s assistant handed Fyr a leather-bound book, he set it on a table at the far end of the room, retreated back into the hallway, and twisted around the door frame to flick it open with a spell from a distance. The solicitor stood silently, arms akimbo and shaking her head, as absolutely nothing happened.

It could have been a very localized rune, Fyr reminded himself, as he sheepishly approached the book again and began to leaf through it in earnest.

The book seemed to be a lab journal, in that there were tables delineating various measurements and arcane readings at regular intervals. The scripts and figures on the page were written in Seif-ij Hidja’s precise hand, clear and meticulous. The actual words themselves, however, sounded nothing like the voice of the laconic Argonian summoner.

It sounded like Morian Zenas.

He knew he should refuse it. This was still a trap, still dangerous, in a way that made a hidden explosive rune look merciful by comparison.

He took the book with him anyway.

It was a mystery that wasn’t a mystery at all. The moment he read the first sentence, there wasn’t any real choice to it. Even if someone had managed to tear it from his hands and throw it into the fire, the words would have stayed with him, like everything else Morian had ever said.

He spent a good chunk of the Third Era returning to the journal between examinations of corprus patients. If anyone asked about it, he said it was a curious puzzle, and that he couldn’t help but try to figure out the described apparatuses, ponder how they were constructed and deduce what the measured data corresponded to in practical terms. He’d already figured out that the journal logs were predated—whatever these experiments were, they were written as if they began in the early Fourth Era and carried on well into the Fifth.

Alfe, sharp as a needle and twice as piercing, had figured out the truth long before he had explained any of the context to her, and would not be convinced otherwise.

“Imagine if anyone knew what a sentimental fool you can be underneath it all,” she said. “Your reputation would be ruined.”

“Don’t be ridiculous,” he’d told her, closing the journal and gently setting it back in its designated place. “It’s already _been_ ruined, and it’ll keep being ruined at regular intervals. That’s what reputations do when you get to be my age.”

“It has nothing to do with your age. You’re just proud and stubborn,” Alfe said, and she was right, of course. Still, a little tact never killed anyone.

(“You’re a damned hypocrite,” she would tell him, if he ever lost his patience enough to say that to her, and she was right about that, as well.)


	2. The Hanged Man

Corprus was called a disease, and understandably so, given its symptoms. He was sure early on that the madness was organic in nature: the deformation of the body would include the brain, after all. The mystery, then, was what the nature of the corruption was.

It was immortality. Unbridled and unrestrained tissue growth, refusing to wither or fade as mortal flesh was wont to do. A malignant neoplasm without the courtesy to let its host body die. It was entirely possible—probable, he’d argue—that there were countless asymptomatic carriers, those who technically had contracted corprus but lacked this uncontrolled expansion of the tissue.

Examination of cultured samples under a series of lenses peeled away some of the further mysteries. On the smallest of scales, it did not behave like flesh: it behaved like chaotic creatia. If it had been creatia, that would have been a simple explanation—such immortality was trivial for Daedric Princes to grant—yet it was still flesh, changed as it was. This was not the immortality of Oblivion, endlessly reforming around the soul after death, but it brought mortals somewhat closer to it than they had been before.

A god’s blessing, then. Or perhaps a curse. Perhaps both at once. It left him musing at times, wondering if this was what happened when a god was both powerful and ambivalent—when the divine could not decide between salvation and suffering, love and hate.

In any event, this opened up some interesting new avenues of research. If corprus made flesh more like creatia, it meant other manipulations of physical existence were possible—Titans and Xivkyn existed due to these properties, after all.

He was always careful, even in thought, to correct himself if he ever referred to this as “creation”. Rearrangement, radical alteration, perhaps even transformation, but Daedra could not create, and this would bear the same restrictions. A brand new soul, the sort of thing that careless young lovers accidentally produced all the time, was out of the question. Captured souls in soul gems were an option, but no one soul was like any other, and the flesh used would have to come from the same source.

No, it would be easier to do it himself. Not all at once, of course. He would use portions of his soul, and provide it enough cultured flesh for his separated self to form a matching body, in the same fashion as the morphotype forming around a Daedric vestige.

It was a bit of a surprise when the body had formed enough to be recognizably female. Perhaps he had unexpectedly drawn out an especially feminine portion of himself. When Alfe finally awoke, however, he was reminded that “feminine” did not mean “gentle”. That was something of a relief.

When it happened again with Beyte, he started to be concerned. Perhaps he was inadvertently doing something to his tissue samples. Surely with this large a portion of his soul, the result should have been male; Beyte was decidedly not.

After Delte, he had to sit in his study with a very large bottle of flin for a few hours.

By the time it was Uupse’s turn, he had resigned himself to the inevitable. For whatever reason, it seemed that any piece of his soul, once taken out of his body and given the chance to decide its own form… was not going to choose a duplicate of his physical body. He refused to consider the implications beyond that. He was four thousand years old, in five different pieces, and this original fraction was much, much too old for this.

When Nilwenya came in to wake up Divayth that morning, she did not hold her chin quite as high. His irritable grumblings as he sat up went without comment, and her gaze kept drifting to glance out the window of his room.

As usual, Divayth didn’t bother to change before shuffling out to queue for medication. He would wonder what he would even be getting out of it at this point, but to be fair, he did prescribe it to himself.

Well, he didn’t _literally_ prescribe it to himself, that would be a blatant ethics violation that no apothecary outside of an outlaws’ refuge would ever fill. He ran the pharmacology by Haj-Vastei, talked about the research, discussed drug classes and structurally related adasel at length before finally settling on a single option. Dosage and schedule he was more than willing to leave entirely to Haj-Vastei’s judgement—that was guaranteed to be perpetually in need of adjustment, and he had to admit that it was something of a relief to be able to let someone else handle that part of the process. The Argonian, of course, liked to joke that he was his easiest patient. Perhaps he was.

The past thousand years had given him a new appreciation for Argonian and Khajiit professionals. If they were well-read enough to recognize his name, they treated it as an amusing but ultimately irrelevant tidbit, like an unusual birthmark. He never once had to deal with one vacillating randomly between unctuous nonsense and unspoken disdain.

The coffee had not been brought up yet when Divayth settled next to Wulf in the dining room. Sometimes that happened. Usually it was because the kitchen staff had a late start—it was a terrible commute even in the best weather, and thick ice on the roads turned it into an impossible one.

Bjorn was staring out the window, his brows knitted in concentration.

“Now that’s a sight,” said Sothgra, crossing their arms as they came up behind him. “Didn’t think it’d be warm enough for the troopers to stay in today.”

“It’s not,” said Bjorn, squinting. “It’s better weather than it was yesterday.”

Both Wulf and Divayth turned at the same time to glance back through the window.

He had expected the surface of Lake Yorgrim to be empty except for the holes from ice fishing. It was not empty. The colorful shelters were still in place. Folding chairs had been flipped on their sides and open coolers were scattered across the ice. Even at this distance, some of the tip-ups were clearly flagging an abandoned catch.

Ah. The news had properly broken, then. Finally.

He began to turn away from the window again. His gaze stopped at Wulf’s face. Bjorn’s confusion was understandable, as was Sothgra’s disbelief. The local Nords had been fishing in the ice every single day, no matter what it took, for longer than any of them had been staying at Nightgate. Wulf was looking out the window, his eyes scanning the abandoned surface of Lake Yorgrim, and he did not look perplexed or worried.

His eyes glistened, and his mouth had curled into the lightest of smiles.

“Well, it’s going to be a long wait for breakfast today,” he said, resting his hands on the table as he turned back from the window. “I don’t suppose I could sell anyone on a game of Five Card Wisp?”

Wulf had only managed to get everyone to play Five Card Wisp a few times before. Although they always drew cards to determine dealer and partners, as per the rules, somehow the final arrangement never changed: Wulf was always the dealer and Divayth was always his partner, leaving Sothgra and Bjorn playing against them. It was against the rules to comment on your cards, and also against the rules to make any kind of signal to a partner.

Every single game, they quietly tossed this aside.

They were all “accidentally” making faces at their cards. They were all making various odd gestures that _might_ be a signal, might be a fake-out pretending to be a signal, or might even be a real gesture without anything behind it. The only thing that anyone could reasonably be sure about was that, outside of the original drawing, Wulf was not palming any cards into the sleeves of his pullover for later. The real game was the cheating, but it had to be equal opportunity cheating. It was a very different beast from patience.

They had already run through two full rounds and were starting a third when Nilwenya’s voice came roaring in from the hall. Sothgra and Bjorn both snapped their heads towards the door, instinctively. Wulf paused and set his cards down, tilting his head curiously.

Nilwenya was not in the door frame, or even nearby. Divayth could not make out what she was saying; from that, he’d assume this had carried all the way from the nurse’s station. Divayth recognized a second voice, faint and apologetic, belonging to a wood elf who worked with the patients on another floor. He seemed to excuse himself, and then the halls felt silent again.

They didn’t have to wait long before Nilwenya entered the dining room with her clipboard.

“We’re going to have to do the morning check-in before breakfast today,” she said, as she erased the whiteboard and corrected the date to Tirdas, 3rd of First Seed. She glanced at the clock and sighed. “Though at this rate it’s going to be a terrible brunch.”

Nilwenya turned towards the group, cleared her throat, and seemed to draw into herself as much Altmer dignity as she could muster. She lifted a photocopied check-in sheet from the clipboard, glanced at it, and the dignity instantly evaporated, like a snowball in Infernace.

“ _Auriel’s bow_ , do we even _need_ this?” She slammed the clipboard down on the table. She missed the cards, but the burst of air sent out when it hit shifted them over several inches anyway. “We all know each other’s names! And whatever pronouns!” With an animated ferocity, she began to indicate each person in the dining room via violent stabs at the air with a blade of stiffened fingers, accompanied by a recitation that almost sounded like an unhinged witches’ chant: “Bjorn, he/him, Wulf, he/him, Divayth, he/him, Sothgra, they/them, Nilwenya, she/her! There. We’re done!” With this she threw up her hands, sending a sheet of paper flying behind her, and collapsed into a nearby chair.

It was another solid minute before anyone dared break the silence that followed.

“I take it the kitchen staff aren’t late this time,” said Sothgra.

“You ‘take it’ correctly,” said Nilwenya, irritably. “They’re not coming in. At all. Any of them.”

“Shor’s bones. The roads are that bad?” Bjorn flattened his cards face-down on the table, eyes wide with genuine concern.

She pressed her lips together tightly, but said nothing.

“I think what our favorite Thalmor spy wants to say,” said Wulf, as he folded his hands over his cards, “is that it doesn’t have anything to do with the roads.”

Nilwenya glared at him. “I’m not at liberty to comment.”

“What the tusk does that even mean?” asked Sothgra.

The old Nord looked down at his hands for a moment of quiet consideration, and then lifted his gaze again to look Divayth in the eye. There was a question in his expression, now, but not the usual kind. It wasn’t the look he had when he was contemplating a mystery he was about to ask Divayth to explain. There was no curiosity in this. It was closer to asking permission—almost pleading for the go-ahead to speak.

Divayth slumped back in his seat, shaking his head. There wasn’t any point.

Wulf looked back down again, and said nothing more about it.

It was already afternoon by the time the wood elf from the other floor arrived with a tray of sandwiches. Roast beef, white bread, a single leaf of lettuce each, and a random handful of condiment packets. He did not bring up coffee, and he remained only long enough to hand the tray over to Nilwenya before dashing back down the stairs again.

“I’m sorry,” she said as she set the tray down on the table, and she sounded like she meant it. “This whole situation is just—entirely unfitting for a professional institution.”

“I’d rather you just freaking told us what’s going on,” said Sothgra. “I’ll decide for myself what’s ‘unfitting’ and what’s not.”

Nilwenya’s eyebrow twitched, and she turned to face Bjorn instead. “The sandwiches are all the same, so take any of them you want. Elbegorn had to eyeball the amount while making lunch for multiple floors, but there should be more than enough to go around.”

Bjorn gingerly took a sandwich from the tray and began to eat it as is, making a face as he did so.

“You’re going to need more water if you’re going to eat it like that,” said Wulf, leaning on the table with one arm.

“It’s fine,” said Bjorn. His face said the opposite, very plainly.

A moment passed in silence before Wulf shook his head and stood up from the table, practically pushing himself up on his hands. “Nilwenya, if it’s all right, I might need to have a word with you in private.”

She sighed. “If it can wait—”

“No, it _can’t_ ,” he said, with a forcefulness that surprised Divayth. In his entire time at Nightgate, he’d never heard Wulf raise his voice, and this was technically not an exception. Despite the “if it’s all right” and “I might need”, however, this was far from a request. It was a command, delivered with the authority of someone who has the power to back it up. The tiniest flash of fear in Nilwenya’s eye seemed to confirm it.

“Very well, then,” she said, her composure quickly restoring itself. “Follow me.”

The two of them left the dining room as Sothgra took a sandwich and began to dissect it into pieces.

Divayth took a drink of water from his mug and pretended to consider the sandwiches. It was strange. Minutes earlier, he had felt nothing but the weight of exhaustion. Introduce the tiniest hint of something secret, even in a context where it could not matter less, and it somehow still managed to kindle a spark in his gut.

He stood up and quietly made his way to the hall, though he also tried to keep it as casual as he could manage. Awkward though it was, his excuse would have to be “Sorry, I need to use the bathroom”; the bathrooms were always locked so that the patients would have to ask staff to unlock the door before they could use them. For safety reasons, of course—just in case he tried to drown himself in the toilet or hang himself with the bog roll, or whatever it was they were afraid he would get up to in there without a chaperone.

The floor was large enough to house five times as many patients as they had, but it didn’t take Divayth long to find the alcove Wulf and Nilwenya had retreated into. It was intended as a cozy little reading nook, lined with soft couches and a bookshelf stacked full of carefully selected reading material. It was also often the space used to allow patients some privacy with visitors, for those few patients who had any at all.

“It’s not too late to make a break for Alftand,” he heard Wulf say. “If you gather up the patients and take them now, you’ll be in Blackreach by tomorrow. If you’re lucky, you might even be able to access the Great Lift, get there in half the time.”

“Last I checked, Skyrim hasn’t had a king in centuries,” Nilwenya replied. “This is the wrong floor for delusions of grandeur, you know. You can’t order me around like a servant.”

“This is not an order,” Wulf said. “This is an appeal to your better nature.” She scoffed at this, but he continued without pausing. “Jokes aside, I know damn well this isn’t where your loyalties lie, and that’s fine. You’re allowed to have your own agenda. The whole reason you’re still here at all is because you believe you’re going to be exempt. We’ll all die, but you expect to ascend to your rightful status, am I right?”

There was a long, pregnant silence, still enough that Divayth felt obliged to hold his breath.

Wulf let out a deep sigh. “My point is, there’s no loss for you here. If you take them to Blackreach, they might actually have a chance to survive. You’re more than skilled enough; a few dozen Falmer won’t break your stride. You’ll be a god soon, so what will you care, then, if your last hours as a mortal were spent on a minor hassle? And if, against all odds, it turns out—”

“Hold. Your. Tongue,” she said, enunciating each word sharply. “You know nothing of this.”

“I know more about it than you can imagine,” said the old Nord, his voice low and rumbling. “Why gamble? There’s no harm in going somewhere safe if it turns out you don’t need the safety. But if you _did_ need it, and you don’t find out until the last hour of your life… that’s not going to be a very pleasant last hour, is it?”

Nilwenya chuckled. “Oh, is that it? You’re so terrified by the thought you’re about to die that you want to spread it around—”

“I didn’t ask you to take me with you,” Wulf said. “If I wanted to leave, _I would just leave._ None of you have had the means to keep me here against my will.” Again, without growing any louder, his voice was an avalanche, a wall of solid stone; somehow he had become both unrelenting force and immovable object in the same breath.

“If that’s the case,” she said, her voice quivering in spite of an obvious effort not to, “what’s stopping you from just plowing through me and heroically leading this retreat to Blackreach yourself?”

“To be frank,” he replied, “if I went to Blackreach, it wouldn’t stay safe for much longer.”

A hiss of air drawn in through her teeth. “No. That’s nonsense.”

“I’ve seen and done things you’ve only heard about as speculation and theory. You think you know what’s coming, and I can tell you, you don’t. It’s so much worse than that—the Dragon’s already broken, and this is ground zero. Everything that happens now is for keeps.”

At the mention of “the Dragon’s already broken”, the smallest hint of a sound escaped Divayth’s lips. It didn’t even feel like it came from him. It came from a Chimer lad off the shore of Tel Aruhn. He was ankle deep in the water, looking for mudcrabs. There was a clap of thunder in the distance. He turned west, towards the approaching storm—the dark sky over Red Mountain.

Divayth was thrown back into the present by the harsh shriek of a shoe sole turning a hard arc along the ground. “Who’s there?” barked Nilwenya.

He awkwardly turned the corner into the nook proper. Nilwenya’s scowl was about what he expected; Wulf’s arms were crossed, his jaw was set, and his eyes were narrowed. The moment he caught sight of Divayth, his entire substance transmuted into something else. His posture relaxed. Tightly gripped hands loosened into open palms, tucked gently into the crooks of his elbows. The expression in his eyes softened. It was like watching a dagger turn into a feather.

“Ah, were we talking that long?” he asked. “Sorry about that. Hopefully we didn’t keep you waiting enough for it to start squirting out your ears.”

Nilwenya shot Wulf a dirty look.

He simply smiled and shrugged his shoulders. “Well, what would you have him do? Go in the rubbish bin? We’re patients, not animals.”

She huffed and tore the key ring off her belt, gripping it tightly in her hand. “We’re done here, anyway. Let’s get this over with.”

Nilwenya stalked furiously past Divayth. As he turned to follow her, Wulf gave Divayth another oddly bright smile, and soundlessly mouthed another apology to him as he passed.

When the two conjurers came to Tel Fyr and told him about the plan to travel Oblivion, his first reaction had been to laugh. They were both deadly serious, of course. The mere fact that they had even considered the Maelstrom of Bal or the Pillar of Thras was evidence of that. It was also evidence that Morian Zenas was a damned fool, the kind who demanded that even the obvious needed to be verified or refuted with experimental evidence.

This was also, unfortunately, the most intriguing kind of fool for Fyr back then. If you were skilled enough with words, you could formally logic your way through anything. A number of talented Telvanni were addicted to the purity of the abstract, the satisfaction of tackling an intellectual challenge untouched by application. This was all well and good, but eventually someone had to roll up their sleeves and cram their hands elbow-deep into the reality of the Aurbis. Morian Zenas could somehow be up to his shoulders in it without ever losing the wide-eyed wonder of a new apprentice.

It was Seif-ij Hidja who kept him from diving in face-first. He was, at first glance, an entirely practical and humorless Argonian mage. He seemed to have very little to say, but Fyr quickly came to realize that any words he spoke were entirely for his benefit, and not for theirs. Whole conversations between Seif-ij and Morian began and ended with a meaningful exchange of glances and facial expressions.

They’d accidentally developed a conjurer’s link with each other, Morian explained at one point. Morian had a tendency to speak for the both of them. Fyr nodded and took this in stride—the Psijics had discovered their techniques after a very similar origin, after all—though there was still a great deal that a link between minds didn’t entirely explain.

It was not uncommon for a master and an apprentice to live together, but Seif-ij was not an apprentice; he was a full Master of Conjuration in his own right. Assistant, certainly, with deference to Morian’s seniority, but even this did not explain everything.

When he accepted an invitation back to their shared residence in the Imperial City, his unspoken suspicions grew larger still. The house technically belonged to Morian, but Seif-ij’s hand could be seen in the decorative details of every room. The Argonian cooked and served every meal, so the kitchen was entirely his realm. He had a room of his own, as well, and Fyr could not help but notice it had absolutely nothing resembling a bed.

This, he was told, was how they had lived for twelve years. Far from a small amount of years for an Argonian and a man.

He wondered, sometimes, how long this could have gone on if Morian had never introduced him to Dr. Lupus.

She was nice enough. She had that manner many women had of being tremendously easy to talk to. Even the best of men seemed to frequently fall into two camps—those who needed constant coddling, lest they burst like a puffball mushroom, and those who were covered in spines, like an angry hedgehog. Some men were even both at once, and woe betide you if you didn’t hover over them until your arms were raw and bleeding. Women could be the same way, of course, but by the numbers, it seemed less frequent.

The problem with women is that everyone wants to protect them. Even—and perhaps especially—the ones that don’t want any protection. Though he had been the one to introduce them, Morian visibly bristled when Fyr told him he’d invited Alfidia to the Tipsy Torchbug later that week.

Fyr had expected a night out with Alfidia would simply be an entertaining time, and nothing more. She was a good conversationalist, curious enough not to be boring, and she held a clear and unending enthusiasm for her field of work, but there was no magnetism there. Her face was pleasant enough, in a very ordinary and uninspiring way. Fyr was not about to lose any sleep over Alfidia Lupus.

Still. Something inside his rib cage scratched at the bone. He did end up losing sleep, but not over Alfidia. Not the woman herself.

His comforting thought at night had been that it was useless, and there was no point in dwelling on the impossible. Morian had a husband of twelve years in all but name. Absolutely inseparable; no room for anyone else. But then, suddenly, there was plenty of room—for a young woman half his age.

Something black twisted around Fyr’s spine the more he thought about it.

He went along with the two of them to a reception for King Logrolf against his better judgement, in spite of knowing that it would be full of drunken Nords, but not in spite of Morian glaring daggers at him. No, it was _because_ of Morian’s glaring.

“You’re here to get between me and Alfidia,” his eyes had said.

Fyr was not sure what his own face had said back. It might have called him an oblivious son-of-a-netch. Without a mirror, it was hard to say.

It was going to end badly. He knew it was. He could tell right from the beginning, from the instant of that first furrowed brow on Morian’s face, this was going to be a disaster.

But a glare was still Morian’s eyes on him. It spoke of hours spent thinking about him, even when he wasn’t there. Asking a woman out to a tavern had succeeded where dozens of intentional efforts had failed miserably.

He was going to see this through to the bitter end.


	3. Judgement

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A head's up—this section is longer than the others, almost entirely because of the sex scene. Because, yes, that E is not there for nothing.

Divayth had a hard time falling asleep that night, which was ironic, given how he’d been nodding off before sunset after a whole day without a cup of coffee. Some hospitals, he gathered, offered only decaf. Nightgate offered both types until noon. Before coming to Nightgate, he’d always preferred chal.

Really, it didn’t matter what it was. A warm cup of something to hold in his hands and fend off the encroaching cold. That was all he wanted, in the end.

It was so cold at night, lying on a mattress as hard as ice. The sheets were thin and the single blanket might have been enough for a Nord, but not for him. A bit of warmth, and he could have nodded off into sleep, perhaps even blessed with a lack of dreams. Instead, he was awake enough to remember fights with Morian.

In a way it was funny—it was always ostensibly about Alfidia, but hardly anything Morian said was about her. Oh, certainly, his intended thesis was “I will be good for her, you will be bad for her,” but the otherwise great champion of empirical evidence leaned entirely on insults and shaming.

Divayth would be bad for her because he was So Old—unlike Morian, who was twice her age, with a man’s lifespan rather than that of a mer, and almost certainly the most likely to die first.

Divayth would be bad for her because he wouldn’t be able to dedicate his entire life to her needs—Divayth, who was actually single and lived alone, unlike Morian, who had all the advantages of twelve years of marriage to an Argonian man without any of the social disadvantages that could come from actually marrying him.

Divayth would be bad for her because he was a Philanderer, and this was an insult that genuinely did get under his skin. He’d had it thrown at him before, so many times, and it was always a socially acceptable way to declare that he’d slept with too many women (they consistently left out the men). A Telvanni preferring the safety of a casual connection to the mutual personal risk of romance—why would _that_ ever happen? Surely if he ever genuinely loved someone, true love and not just lust, he wouldn’t give a damn about making them a target for the usual kind of perpetual manipulation and veiled threat that his House had taken and shaped into a spiraling tower of self-buttressing pride.

And didn’t he realize, clearly, that the more people you’ve been intimate with, the less those people must mean to you, and the less you must matter to anyone anywhere? His value was inversely proportional to the number of lovers he’d ever had, which was only guaranteed to increase over time.

Looking back at the memories, he always tried to rewrite them, to go back into the past and give himself the staircase wit he didn’t have at the time. Divayth Fyr, representing the salt of the earth and of House Telvanni. But he knew that even if he’d had these words, he could never have said them. Every single fight, he swore to himself that it had gone too far, that in the morning he was going back to Tel Fyr, and every single time, he let himself be talked out of it, because without him, Morian wouldn’t be able to go to Oblivion.

He should have left. He should have just left. It should have been easy and simple and unambiguous—have your goddamn sentient living being as an uncontested prize, this was absolutely worth alienating and insulting the sorcerer you specifically sought out for help after twelve years of research and experimentation. You made your bed, Morian; now you have to lie in it. But it always went back to the status quo, with Divayth continuing to spend time away from his own tower and his own research to help Morian and Seif-ij with the finer details of travel through the planes. Weeks would pass where it was almost as if Alfidia never existed. Then she would flit back into the periphery, never knowing the destruction that dragged behind the hem of her robes.

He needed to draw his mind away from this. He was never going to get to sleep at this rate. These memories went in never-ending circles. It had only been a few years in real time, but in his heart, it had never stopped.

He couldn’t think about anything else.

Divayth got up out of bed. If it was that bad, he was going to have to ask for a sedative. Worrying about the potential for addiction was useless. How many hours were left? Thirty? Less than that.

It was normal for the floor to be empty and quiet this late at night. It was not normal for there to be absolutely no one at the nurse’s station, but given the circumstances, they were probably more overworked and understaffed than usual. Even Nilwenya regularly put in double shifts before all of this.

He leaned against the desk and waited. There were only four patients remaining; it couldn’t take that long to come back from the quarter-hour safety check.

It was silent except for the clock ticking. Even his own breath seemed faint by comparison. When he finally heard the sound of soft footsteps approaching, his whole body turned towards it, far more forcefully than the situation called for.

“It’s just me,” said Wulf, shuffling up to the station and resting his elbows on the surface. “I take it I’m going to have a bit of a wait before I can go.”

“It shouldn’t be much longer,” said Divayth. “I’ve already been here a while already. Do you remember who’s supposed to be on tonight?”

He shook his head. “For all I know, no one is. Might’ve all just gone home for the night, and that’s that.”

“There has to be someone. They wouldn’t just leave an entire hospital unstaffed.”

“I’m sure this isn’t news for you, Divayth,” said Wulf, “but when push comes to shove, our need to piss with dignity isn’t a very high priority for anyone else.”

“I’m supposed to be on suicide watch,” said Divayth.

“Maybe they caught on to the fact that Nightgate is your method,” replied Wulf.

His gaze snapped to Wulf at this, and the Nord lifted his eyes to meet his. He had a soft half-smile on his face.

“I’m not criticizing you for it,” he said, squinting sleepily back at him. “It sure beats dying alone.”

“You’re not any different,” replied Divayth, firmly. “That’s the real reason you’re here, too.”

“An entire floor for people like you,” said Wulf, stifling a yawn at the end.

Something felt off about this. Divayth shifted his weight slightly, keeping his eyes on the Nord’s face.

“Maybe promising an entire floor was a bit much,” he continued. “Sothgra and Bjorn are exactly what they look like, or close enough to it, at any rate. But there’s one other person like you, and that’s more than zero.”

Though he was not aware of having moved, he realized he was no longer leaning against the nurse’s station. He was in the dining room, sitting with his back to the window. Wulf was seated next to him, his arm around his shoulders, partially turned and staring past him with a wry smile and tired eyes.

“Do you plan on telling him what you did?” asked Wulf, conversationally. “Do you think he’ll understand?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” said Divayth.

“There are a lot of things I could be talking about,” he replied. The hand on his shoulder softly stroked his deltoid. “So many things that you expect, if he knew about them, he wouldn’t look at you the same way anymore.”

Moonlight fell against the side of Wulf’s head, seeming to spread throughout the loose wisps of his hair, and his other hand moved forward to rest on Divayth’s knee.

Nightgate had a rule against touching. It hit him very suddenly, out of nowhere, which was strange, because it wasn’t as if he had ever forgotten it. Even as far back as Sun’s Dawn, when Divayth and Wulf had just met, the rule had magnified his awareness of the distance between them. Centuries had passed since he’d last felt how cruelly vast an inch or two of air could be.

“You aren’t Wulf,” said Divayth.

The smile on the face of the thing that looked like Wulf simply grew wider.

“Perhaps he would understand,” it said in his voice, “if you told him how used you felt. If you told him about the paralyzing outrage that filled you at the thought that Morian would be rewarded with everything he ever wanted, and would never be held accountable for what he did to you.”

“It didn’t change anything,” he said, half under his breath. “I didn’t even feel better. All that happened was that Alfidia threw her life away, and Seif-ij left me that damned log book.”

“And yet,” said the thing, still smiling widely, “the price that was named shall be met.”

He thought he heard chanting, but it was not chanting. It had words he knew well, though the words were not spoken—they shook the air itself, like the ringing of a brass bell. He could hear the glass of the window vibrating to an unnatural rhythm behind him:

AE HERMA MORA ALTADOON PADHOME LKHAN AE AI.

As the words passed through him, he could not stop himself from rising and turning to look out the window.

He awoke back in his bed, breathing hard and tangled up in the single thin blanket. He clamped his eyes shut and tried to bring his breathing back in line. Slow, deep breaths. That was a nightmare; it was not real.

His eyes were shut, of course, because it was entirely possible this was a false awakening.

Time passed quietly enough. Nothing was happening. He could hear the soft footsteps of whoever was on night duty, pausing for a moment of silence at each door: the quarter-hour check.

Divayth let out a small sigh of relief, and allowed his eyes to open. His room was filled with the dim red light of early sunrise. He laid in bed for a while longer, rubbing at his eyes and temples. He felt like he hadn’t gotten any sleep at all.

He had not been lying there very long before Nilwenya came by to wake him up.

“Aren’t you a bit early?” he asked. The reddish tint of an intense sunrise still cast long shadows across the whole of his room.

Her face twisted with an expression he could not entirely place.

“It’s actually late,” said Nilwenya. “Come on. We’ll get you your meds, and something like breakfast.”

As Bjorn walked away and Divayth stepped forward in the queue, he began to realize that the light was not changing color. It should have shifted to the warm hues of the golden hour by now. Everything had grown brighter, but the reddish cast of sunrise had not diminished in the slightest.

It was only once he entered the dining room and caught a glimpse of the view over Lake Yorgrim that he realized it wasn’t sunrise at all.

The sky was a brilliant scarlet, uniform from zenith to horizon, and without a single cloud to interrupt it. Both moons were visible in the sky, Secunda aligned before Masser as they would be in an eclipse, but the sun was not blocked by Masser as it should have been. It was covered by a third moon that fell behind Masser, black and lightless, so large that even the red moon seemed dwarfed by it.

Wulf was seated in his usual place, with his back to the window, as if it was an ordinary morning and he wanted to avoid getting the sun in his eyes. A tray had been placed in the middle of the table, piled high with slices of toast, and next to it sat a butter knife and a wooden bowl filled with packets of butter, jam, and nut paste.

Bjorn was still standing just inside the doorway, gawking at the view outside. Wulf was eating a bit of toast and jam. The first made nothing but sense, but it was the second that helped bring Divayth back down to earth. It wasn’t over yet. It was still only the fourth of First Seed.

He shuffled over and sat down next to Wulf, the same as he’d done every morning before. Wulf gave him the same silent nod of acknowledgement he’d come to expect from him, and he wordlessly picked up a butter knife and turned it in his hand to offer the handle to him.

Normally Divayth would be careful to take the knife exactly as offered—it was a simple kindness that could easily avoid any skin contact. This time, when he reached forward for the handle, he brought his other hand underneath the dull blade, as if to catch it if his grip was too loose. His fingers and palm brushed against the scars on Wulf’s knuckles and came to rest just below the back of his wrist.

His eyes widened and he looked at Divayth, but he made no motion to let go of the knife. The difference between a second and several minutes seemed to vanish. Wulf’s eyes returned to a soft regard, and he allowed his arm to lower the tiny sliver necessary to rest against Divayth’s hand.

It was profoundly disappointing that he had to withdraw his hands and use them to butter toast.

Fyr finally began to understand the journal and its contents a few years after the Oblivion Crisis. A number of mysteries in deciphering the journal were solved for him by the passage of time. Some of the energies had simply not been discovered yet, or were known to exist but lacked a set standard of measurement. With increasingly unsurprising prescience, Morian knew the future standard units and knew the one-day commonplace names for the devices used to measure them. His words on the page spoke of each and every detail as if it was always a Known Thing, and Seif-ij had transcribed it all without so much as a scratch out of place.

The pieces were starting to slot together, an intricate puzzle’s shape becoming visible. Even before he was able to reproduce the first experiment—results exactly the same as written, down to the very hour and day—Fyr knew enough to understand what he was looking at, finally.

And he couldn’t do a damned thing about it.

Oh, he tried to. He reached out to every last contact he had. Some of them even had the courtesy to reply. Stiff apologies empty of any true regret: while This seemed Very Interesting Indeed (there were no details on This, of course, to indicate if they’d even read the damn thing before chucking it in the fireplace, because _why would they_ ), unfortunately it would be detrimental to our research to be publicly associated with—

There was never any point in reading past the “unfortunately”. It seemed there were only about three or four different ways to politely say “Fyr, it doesn’t matter what you’ve got here, I wouldn’t piss on you if you were on fire.”

They never mentioned his Daughters. Which was ironic, because this was all supposed to be about them.

Uupse and Delte had taken on false names and were living in Blacklight as a married couple, last he knew. He did not and could not follow up on them to be sure, even in the chaos of the Red Year. He had to just hope that if they were in trouble and needed his help, they would seek him out, and that they’d both have the sense not to do so in the ruins of what had once been Tel Fyr and the Corprusarium.

The mere suggestion of a name change had sent Alfe into a tear, context be damned, she was Alfe Fyr and if anyone had a problem with that they could say it to her face and see how long they lasted. He didn’t push the issue; she was as much a recluse as he was, these days, and as long as her hideout in Skyrim had enough security features in place, she’d probably outlive everyone involved.

Beyte had blamed herself.

“This isn’t your fault,” he’d told her. “Nothing you said to him was different from what you’ve said to any other visitor to Tel Fyr over who knows how long.”

“Then that just means it could have happened sooner,” she said. “I’ve been rolling dice with our lives all this time.”

Her hair hung loose and tangled. There were heavy bags under her eyes; she’d slept so little since the whole thing broke that Alfe had wanted to forcibly sedate her. Of course, he couldn’t let her do that. If word of _that_ got out, it would just throw more fuel on the fire.

Fyr pulled up a stool and sat across from her. He wanted to sit next to her, put an arm around her shoulders, brush the hair out of her eyes. Simple things that other people did all the time, and were now suspect, even in private.

“If it’s anyone’s fault,” he said, rubbing at the bridge of his nose, “it’s mine for deciding to call you Daughters. Not that there is a word for what any of this is.”

“It seemed as good a word as any at the time,” Beyte said, echoing his own thoughts. Not by intent, likely. It was more that, in a way that was not entirely metaphorical, she’d received the largest portion of the parts of himself Fyr kept locked away.

He raised his head to look at her. From behind uncombed hair, his own eyes were staring back at him.

It was the last time they ever spoke. He never knew where she went, what had happened to her, or even if she was still alive. For a long time, it was just him and Vistha-Kai, constantly travelling from one place to another in search of someone who would listen, long past the point that the Argonian warrior grew as withered and dry as a worm in a bowl of salt.

Eventually Divayth Fyr was on his own.

After the four of them had adjusted enough to get at least a single slice of toast down their throats, Nilwenya came in. She was carrying her clipboard, but did not pass out any photocopies.

“All right,” she said. “I think it’s safe to say you all know how bad it is, now.”

“No shit,” said Sothgra.

Her eyebrow twitched, but she did not pause. “The facility has already had to fall back to local generators. At the rate things are going, we’ll probably lose power sometime tonight.”

Nilwenya did stop here, turning to fix her gaze solidly on Wulf for a moment. His eyes were shut, and she seemingly didn’t notice that he was leaning close enough to Divayth for their shoulders to touch.

“I’ve talked it over with Elbegorn and a few others,” she said, “and a contact of mine was able to confirm that the Great Lift of Alftand is operational. I was also able to secure a vehicle large enough to transport all the patients left in Nightgate.”

Wulf’s eyes shot open, and he stared at her with an expression that began as wonder, then brightened into something like pride.

Sothgra scratched at the back of their ear. “How did you manage to get something that big?”

“It was a long night,” replied Nilwenya. “Anyway, it’s not going to be as simple as just getting everyone out of Nightgate and into Blackreach. You’re all on medication, for example—we need to make sure to take enough that those of you who can taper off can do so safely, and that those of you who can’t will be stable until we can come up with a long-term solution.” She held her clipboard close to her chest, frowning. “We also need to bring a decent amount of non-perishable food. Blackreach is sustainable, but I can’t imagine any of you warming up to chaurus meat right away.”

“We _are_ leaving, then?” asked Sothgra. “But it’s going to take a while to make all that happen.”

“No, it's not,” said Nilwenya, "because you’re all going to help out."

She erased the whiteboard and began to write out a detailed plan of action, scheduled down to the minute. Theirs was not the only floor that was recruiting patients to make up for the lack of staff on hand, it seemed, but for simplicity’s sake, she kept the focus to what _this_ floor specifically needed to do as part of The Plan.

Bjorn was tasked with helping Elbegorn with medical equipment, basic living supplies and transporting the less mobile patients. Wulf was assigned to help another staff member sort through the kitchen and pack enough non-perishable food. Divayth was going to help Nilwenya with prioritizing and packing medications—“yes, I know, you’re a _patient_ ,” she said, “but to be quite frank, you’re probably more qualified to make these calls than I am.”

He couldn’t help but raise an eyebrow at this, though Sothgra had already spoken before he could say anything in response.

“What are you planning for me to do, exactly?” they asked. “Because if you’re expecting me to follow orders, I’m not sure where you got that nonsense from.”

“Your job,” said Nilwenya, “is to keep the rest of us on track and accountable. Yell at anyone who’s not doing what they’re supposed to. Including me. Especially me.”

They grinned. “And what if I don’t do that?”

“Then I suppose you’ll have to yell at yourself,” she replied.

Divayth had never seen Sothgra laugh as hard at anything Nilwenya had ever said before.

As everyone rose and began to scatter in the directions of their newly assigned duties—including Sothgra rubbing their chin as they squinted at the schedule on the whiteboard—Divayth noted Wulf briefly pulling Nilwenya aside.

“What changed your mind?” he asked, quietly.

She looked at him down her nose, her chin held high as ever. “Nothing. You were simply wrong.”

“Really? So you actually aren’t Thalmor, after all?”

“Even if I was, I wouldn’t ever be able to say I was,” she said, firmly. “But you can be sure that, regardless of all other things, I am a _professional_. And a professional does not abandon those in her care.”

He couldn’t help but crack a smile, it seemed.

“A vehicle large enough to transport all the patients left in Nightgate” was, it turned out, something of a polite misdirection. Nilwenya had somehow commandeered a double-decker transport bus from the streets of Windhelm.

While it was very likely no one in Windhelm was planning on taking the bus anywhere at a time like this, Divayth noted minor damage to the door hinges and some wires hanging down under the driving wheel. After they finished loading the last box of packed medicines in the back, his suspicions were confirmed: Nilwenya bent down next to the driver’s seat and started the engine with a brief arc of sparks from her hand to the exposed wire. She did not bother to hide this from him, and reached over to adjust the heating controls.

“All right,” she told the crowd waiting on the curb. “Time to start getting everyone inside. Remember, we’re going in order of floor then room number, one at a time. No need to panic; there’s room for everyone.”

Wulf was standing a good distance back, leaning against the wall with his hands in his pockets. Despite the scarlet red cast to the sky, it wasn’t any warmer than it had been, so his breath lingered in puffs of soft fog before his face.

He leaned forward when Divayth broke away from the group and walked over.

“Sorry, I hoped Nilwenya would have told you,” the old Nord said to him as he approached. “I won’t be coming along, I’m afraid.”

“I know,” he replied. “Numidium has your heart, doesn’t it? Though I had heard you had gotten it back.”

Wulf’s eyes looked Divayth up and down, his expression suddenly unreadable.

“So you did figure it out,” he said, finally.

Divayth moved to one side and leaned against the wall next to him. “You weren’t exactly hiding very carefully. The only name that would have been more obvious would have been ‘Ysmir’.”

He let out a soft chuckle. “Oh, every Dragonborn is Ysmir. It’s what people call you when they don’t want to bother with your real name.”

A moment of silence passed as the both of them watched Nilwenya, Elbegorn, and three other staff members directing a long queue of patients into the bus.

“It’s a little strange to think about it,” said Divayth. “We could have met a long time ago, but we never did.”

He removed a hand from his pocket and massaged the bridge of his nose with it. “It’s probably for the best. Last time I was in Vvardenfell, it wasn’t a good time.”

“I think you’d be hard-pressed to find anyone who thought the Battle of Red Mountain was enjoyable.”

“There’s always someone,” said Wulf. He let his hand fall before his face. “Besides, I was still fairly young and stupid. You would have met me at the heights of stubborn idiocy.”

“You peaked early,” mused Divayth. “It took me millennia to reach my heights.”

Wulf laughed. “Divayth, you don’t have a stupid bone in your body.”

“On the contrary,” he said, “I have over two hundred stupid bones in my body, and each one is responsible for a completely separate bad decision.”

The last few patients were stepping up off the pavement and into the bus door.

“I suppose this is goodbye, then,” said Wulf.

“No, it’s not,” replied Divayth. “I’m not leaving, either.”

Wulf stared at his profile as the last patient entered the bus, and the door slid shut. Another half-minute of disbelief, and the bus was pulling away from the curb and driving off into the distance. Divayth watched it without a whisper of regret.

If anything, he felt sorry for them. The future they had ahead of them might turn out to be longer than sixteen hours, but if it did, it was also going to be far harder.

His attention fell back to Wulf as he heard the jingling of keys beside him.

“A parting gift from Nilwenya,” said the Nord, holding up her key chain. “King of the castle, for as long as it stands.” He let his hand fall back down to his side. “I’d be a terrible king if I didn’t offer hot coffee and dinner before the power goes out, at least. I can’t promise it’ll be great, but it won’t be sandwiches.”

“As long as there’s coffee,” said Divayth, as he reached over and took Wulf’s hand.

It turned out Wulf had not just offered his bed without preparation. There was a pile of at least fifteen blankets on top of the sheets, stolen from all the unused beds in the empty rooms on the floor. Wulf lifted the corner and gently motioned for Divayth to go first, and when he did, his breath hitched in surprise at how much radiating heat the space still contained. He found himself naturally burrowing into a position aligned with the warmest spots, and he realized this doubled-up smallness had to be how Wulf slept every night.

The old Nord slipped in behind him, pulling the blankets up high over their ears. The pile was thick and heavy: a strangely comforting weight. He wrapped an arm around him, drawing in close, and Divayth eased back into the embrace, pressing his back against Wulf’s chest.

“God, you’re freezing,” said Wulf, his face nuzzling up against the back of his neck. “Were you always this cold at night?”

“In the grand scale of things,” said Divayth, “having enough blankets didn’t seem like a high priority.”

A sigh tickled the loose hairs at the base of his scalp. “See, I’d expect it to be the other way around. There’s no way to avoid what’s coming, so you might as well be comfortable.”

For a time, there was no sound but the ticking of the clock in the hallway.

Divayth turned his head back slightly. “Is that what this is, then? Just being comfortable?”

“That depends,” Wulf replied. “Did you want it to be something else?”

His fingers tapped lightly along Wulf’s arm from elbow to wrist, tracing the path of the ulnar nerve.

“I did expect,” he said, “that an invitation into another man’s bed to ‘share body heat’ would be a discreet proposition.”

Wulf let out a soft chuckle by his ear. “Ah, am I being scolded for being too much of a gentleman?” He slipped his other arm under Divayth’s side, lifting him up as he clasped him even more tightly.

“There’s being a gentleman and then there’s being a tease,” replied Divayth, his voice level as he ground back against Wulf’s thighs. The arms around him shook briefly, and Divayth smiled to himself as he heard the Nord swear under his breath.

“You would be an expert on that, wouldn’t you?” The hand that had been resting on his chest slowly began to migrate down his stomach. “I might need a bit of guidance, then,” he said, as his fingers slipped inside Divayth’s smallclothes.

“You’re doing fine,” said Divayth, firmly, caressing his wrist as those fingers trailed down through his pubic hair.

It was harder than he had thought it would be to keep his breath steady as Wulf’s hand curled around his cock. Wulf’s fingers quivered slightly, like he was holding something fragile and precious.

“Start with how you would touch yourself,” he said, and had to stop to swallow his own need.

Wulf hummed against the side of his neck. “That might not be such a good idea. I’m not very nice to myself.”

“Nice is overrated,” Divayth started to say, but the final word caught in his throat as Wulf’s grip tightened and he began to twist his foreskin over the head of his cock.

“There’s no need to rush,” he murmured, his wrist moving in a soft, sinuous motion, “and there’s no need to go at it like I’m killing a snake.”

His hips were already starting to rock into Wulf’s hand, in spite of himself.

“Surely,” Divayth breathed, “you’re not always in that much of a hurry.”

Wulf’s initial response was a soft hiss as he pressed his own hips against him. “I already had some bad habits,” he huffed, “before quarter-hour checks.”

He couldn’t help but imagine Wulf bent double under the covers, breathing fast and hard as he wrung his cock in desperation. “You poor thing,” he said, and a shivering groan escaped him. His own cock was growing harder in Wulf’s hand, and that thought helped it along quite a bit.

Wulf chuckled as he loosened his grip and moved his hand down Divayth’s shaft. “It is what it is,” he said, as he slowly began to stroke its full length.

He was very attentive, profoundly good at following directions, and occasionally a little too eager. More than once, Divayth’s instructions were interrupted by his own gasps as Wulf obeyed them before he could finish the sentence.

“You’re doing that on purpose,” he panted, after the third time.

“I might be,” he said, a fingertip gently circling the very tip of Divayth’s cock. “Did you want me to stop?”

Divayth’s response was to twist around onto his back, pulling Wulf down on top of him and into a forceful kiss. His other hand quickly found its target, and he smiled as Wulf’s breath grew heavy and desperate.

There were only a few hours left—how many was hard to say without looking at the clock. There had been no sunset and the red cast had not diminished at all from the day. In any other context, it might have seemed like too little time, but there was time for Divayth to bring Wulf to the brink and then fall back, again and again.

This was not at all what he had imagined he would be doing at the end. Still, as Wulf moaned into his mouth, he couldn’t imagine wanting to do anything else.

Well. That wasn’t completely true. He could imagine a few things they didn’t have time for. He whispered one of them to Wulf as he pumped his cock, prompting such a beautiful noise from him that Divayth decided to have mercy and quickened his pace.

Wulf responded with something that tried very, very hard to be words. Divayth slowed down just enough to let him speak.

“I shouldn’t be—” His eyes clamped shut and he moaned softly, hips moving in rhythm with Divayth’s hand. “I should face away. I can’t—”

“Ah, that’s right,” said Divayth, not stopping or slowing down. “How did the story go? Your voice was too powerful for you to be sworn in, so they had to use scribes?”

Wulf nodded, biting his lip.

Divayth smiled. “And yet this room is still in one piece, somehow.”

He swallowed another moan. “It was never— _this good_ —”

He hummed with satisfaction and let go of Wulf’s cock. Wulf immediately let out a sigh that was both disappointment and relief in a single breath.

When they both sat up in bed and cast off the covers, the air seemed shockingly cold, though it was not enough for Divayth’s own erection to start to fade. What was meant to be a quick kiss lingered a bit longer than he’d intended; he had to tear himself away to circle around behind Wulf, pressing up against him with his cock against his lower back.

Divayth rested his chin on a shoulder as he slowly brought his hands down Wulf’s chest, his sides, his hips. He grinned to himself at how much Wulf shook as his hands slid past their supposed destination to his outer thighs. His hands moved to the soft skin of his inner thighs and he began gliding back up at a glacier’s pace, his hands stopping to each side of his cock—so very, very close without connecting.

“Ready?” he asked, rubbing the side of his face against Wulf’s jaw.

“Yes,” replied Wulf, not even a full breath after Divayth asked. The ache was clear in his tone; he was almost begging.

Divayth picked up his cock with one hand, a firm grip of his foreskin, and resumed the pace he’d had before, as if he’d never stopped. Wulf’s hands gripped the sheets tightly, and he stifled another moan.

“There’s no need to hold back,” said Divayth said in Wulf’s ear, and he added a little twist to the upstroke when his hand reached the head of Wulf’s cock.

He opened his mouth, and the window shattered. No, not the window—the wall.

Divayth stared at the hole where the outside-facing wall had been. One second it was there; the next, it was gone, leaving oddly soft edges, like sand blown away by the wind. Even though he was expecting it, the magnitude came as enough of a surprise that he spent another minute with Wulf’s cock resting in his hand before Divayth realized that what Wulf had cried out—what had destroyed the wall—was his own name.

“Sorry,” Wulf said, his breath still heaving, but less with each second. “This room was cold enough as it is. Now it’s even worse.”

He had shot across the sheets and headboard, possibly even out with the wall into the open air. The blankets, however, were fine.

“It’s just one wall,” said Divayth. “We literally have all of Nightgate.”

He honestly wasn’t sure what possessed him to take it to the dining room. It might well have been one of those terrible ideas that merely spirals out of something else—why not sit in the dining room, wrapped in an excessive number of blankets, and begin the last hour with Divayth’s cock in Wulf’s mouth?

His hands were in his hair, petting Wulf’s face the whole time, and to be honest, he did not last very long at all before he came. It did not feel like it happened too quickly; it felt inevitable, and it felt right. Wulf licked him clean before he sat back up, pulling Divayth close and wrapping the blankets even more tightly around them, almost a manmade cocoon.

“I have to admit,” Wulf said to him, his breath fogging now, “even if we were both a pair of idiots, I wish I’d met you sooner than this.”

“I wish I had, too,” replied Divayth, his head resting on Wulf’s collarbone.

They spent the last minutes together in companionable silence, much as they had so many times before. When the end came, it was a flash of blinding light, and then nothing at all.

That which began as Divayth Fyr opened one eye, then another. This seemed to be residual habit. The rest of their eyes opened in quick succession afterward, looking one way and then every other, taking in the endless corridors and the shelves of tomes. A few settled for a time on the horizon of the black sea.

It was both some time and no time at all before their eyes flitted up all at once to gaze upon the Golden Eye. He had always been there, of course, but they had not seen Him until He wished them to.

—This is unexpected, they said, with some mild hesitation. I expected to be part of the collection, not helping to curate it.

—So you did, replied the Old Antecedent. And yet, believing that to be your fate, you did not attempt to flee it. You paid the price demanded of you. That is not something that happens often.

—I suppose so, said that which began as Divayth Fyr. I had also never thought of you as the kind to issue rewards.

—You may see it as a reward, if you wish, He replied. It does not matter either way. It is where you are most suited to be, and what you are most suited to do. Come. There is much work to be done.

That was how it all started.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I doubt anyone was yelling at the gates for apocalyptic Divayth Fyr/Wulfharth of Atmora, but that's how I'm sending off 2020.


End file.
